


Three Children of Loki

by Gileonnen



Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: Canonical Death by Fever, F/M, Gen, Prophetic Dreams, Shieldmaidens and Shieldmothers, Thralldom and Disenthrallment, Triptych
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-19
Updated: 2013-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-05 05:05:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1089937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gileonnen/pseuds/Gileonnen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the night that Lagertha laid her daughter on the pyre, the wolves returned to Kattegat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three Children of Loki

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nestorius](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nestorius/gifts).



> The geography of Vikings is shady at best. Purely on the basis of the gorgeous hills of their world, I have placed them on the east (Swedish) coast of the Kattegat instead of the flatter western coast.

On the night that Lagertha laid her daughter on the pyre, the wolves returned to Kattegat.

They came like hungry wraiths through the lingering smoke, their ember eyes gleaming and their long tongues lolling from their mouths. Their claws made no mark on the soot-blackened strand.

If she'd had a sword, Lagertha would have harrowed them from her halls. Even without, she thought, she could snap one's neck before the rest tore her to pieces. Hands held before her, she braced herself with the water at her back. "You have taken old men to Hel's hall. You carried women and children to Helgafjell in your teeth. You have taken my daughter, when I begged the gods to let her live. There is nothing more you can take from me."

"More yet will be asked of you," said one wolf, larger and braver than his brethren. He crept closer, unafraid at Lagertha's raised hands, until she could smell the rank meat stench of his breath. "Until you have lost your life, there is always more that you can lose."

She knew his voice. A silvery thread of cold wove through her.

"Can you find the sun, Lagertha?" asked the wolf. He raised a sunstone high above their heads, the way her husband had done on that long-ago voyage to the west. Even through the pyre's choking clouds, the sunstone caught the light and bent it, until a single ray fell upon the wolf's too-human face.

His eyes were blue as ice.

Ragnar Lothbrok's gaze never broke from hers as he plucked the sun from the sky and swallowed it whole.

* * *

She woke with her sword hilt in her hand and Ragnar's name on her lips.

 _The seer said I was right to fear._ She threw off her blankets and furs and paced from the bed in her shift, sword held before her like a torch against the darkness. Her hands were shaking. The hairs on her arms and legs stood on end, stirred by a chill that was more than physical.

The plague had cut through her women with a merciless blade. The hall stood all but empty, and every echo was strange to her ears. It was not the home that she and Ragnar had built, where she had borne her two children and woven cloth to warm them on cold nights such as this.

This was the hall where the gods had ripped her stillborn son from her body in a torrent of blood. It was the hall where sweet Gyda had slipped away, as surely as a stone beneath the waves.

Kattegat was an open grave, and all the wealth of its jarl only tribute to the dead. She would not cling to it like Fafnir to Andvari's gold, letting it poison her and all she loved.

By the time she reached the entryway, her mind was made up.

She gathered only a little gear: finery enough to name her jarl's wife when she sought a host, and food enough to see her safely between halls. Sword and shield to preserve her where goodwill and guest right could not.

This done, she went to Athelstan's side and knelt to shake him awake. "Hear this, slave."

Whether it was the urgency of her voice that stirred him from sluggishness, or only the glint of the hall fire on her blade, she did not care. She cared only that he uncurled from his nest of blankets and met her eyes as though he marked her. "I free you," she whispered. "You will be my steward while I am away."

"Where are you going?" he asked.

"I ride to join my husband in Götland," she answered. It felt right to say it. It felt right as nothing had felt right since Ragnar Lothbrok had left her side.

Athelstan caught her hands in his. They were warm, and she was a thing of ice. "We need you here. You are Ragnar Lothbrok's wife. The people heed you; they will not heed a man they knew as a slave."

She freed a hand and took a ring from the pouch at her hip. The metal was as cold as her skin. "Swear to me that you will serve as my husband's bondsman. But do it quickly, Athelstan. Ragnar does not know the danger he faces."

His hand trembled in hers, but he nodded once. "I swear," he said. "By the gods, I swear."

"Swear by the god you worship. Mine will not take your oath."

At that, Athelstan dropped his gaze. "My god forbids the swearing of oaths. But by the love I bear for your family--" and she remembered, with a pang like a fresh wound, how Gyda had spent her last breath pleading for the gods to save him "--I swear to honor this bond, as I take my lord's ring."

The ring slid easily over his slim hand and onto his arm. It flashed in the firelight like a dragon's eye.

Lagertha climbed to her feet. From this vantage, it was impossible to miss the marks that his sickness had left on Athelstan's face. A part of him had withered with the fever, and she could not stay to watch it grow strong again.

"The gods did not hear me, when I begged them to lift the cloud of poison," she said. She tasted the bitterness of those words. "If I had left Kattegat the day I dreamed of my husband's fall, they might never have visited this sickness on us."

"To every thing, there is a season." She had heard this cant before, though, and she thought it signified no more to Athelstan than it did to her.

Once more, she reached down to clasped his hand--this time, as a comrade in arms. "It is my season to ride for Götland. Farewell, my friend."

She left Athelstan beside the fire, still turning his ring around and around his wrist as though he thought it was a new shackle.

* * *

Ragnar Lothbrok had taken ship to Götland, but there were no ships for the asking anywhere along the coast. At times, she saw what might have been warriors riding the spines of distant hills, but she never drew close enough to mark how they painted their shields. The terrain grew steeper as she drove ever further north, her horse more exhausted with every rest she rode.

The wolves still plagued her dreams, though, and with every dawn she woke hollow-eyed and ashen-faced, grim as Hel in her court of corpses.

"Wait for the raiding season, shieldmaiden," her hosts advised her, filling her horn with mead while her heartstrings sang with longing to be away. "Then you will find ships to take you, and men glad of your strong arm."

"I seek Götland, Jarl Borg, and my husband. I do not seek not a warrior's death," she answered every time.

In a Geatish hall, though, while the rain lashed the walls and drove the wind howling through the chinks, they spoke of wars between brothers and asked whether she came to declare for a side.

"I seek only Ragnar Lothbrok," she said. "I do not seek death in battle."

Her host raised his horn to her and answered, "Then you may find it all the same."

**Author's Note:**

> Loki's three children with the jötunn Angrboða were the wolf Fenrir, whose brood would devour the sun; the dragon Jörmungandr, who circumscribes the world; and the goddess Hel, whose charge was those men who died inglorious deaths.


End file.
